Previews

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

The raccoon thief we love to love is back for a newly expanded, globe-trotting adventure. Fans have every reason to get excited.

Spiffy:

Newly reimagined gameplay emphasizes sneakiness and teamwork; seems to excel in all categories original did, which is a lot.

Iffy:

Not much, so far.

Sucker Punch's Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus was one hell of a fine platformer, but saddled with uninspired cover art and a rather unwieldy title. Perhaps as a result, its smooth gameplay and outstanding sense of character seemed to get overshadowed by more heavily promoted contemporaries like Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter. Don't feel too sorry for Sly, though, as his debut game still moved over a million units worldwide. Where there're sales there're sequels, and so the Sly saga is about to expand with a brand-new entry. The more reasonably monikered Sly 2: Band of Thieves was recently unveiled at a press event in Sucker Punch's Seattle HQ, and from what I've played and seen so far, Sly 2 is well on its way to surpassing the memorable original.

Brian Fleming, Sly 2's producer and a Sucker Punch co-founder, summed the new game up in about 14 words. "One sentence we've been working on for the last 18 months is, 'Sly and the gang work together to pull off a string of big heists.' Once we had that one sentence, all roads have led from that keypoint. Virtually every decision we've made about how to construct the game and how to build the technology has been in support of that." He continued, "We really wanted to deliver on this vision of 'heists.' We wanted to give you the impression you were playing in [the movies] The Italian Job or The Thomas Crown Affair." High concept? Yep. Or close enough for a platformer, anyway.

A new world of thiefiness awaits.

Before we delve deeper, a bit of background is in order. Sly 2: Band of Thieves takes place two years after the first game, in which Sly defeated Clockwerk, his family's robotic arch-nemesis. Now, word's reached Sly and the gang that the pieces of Clockwerk have been excavated by Interpol and put in a museum. They race there to confirm, but find that the pieces have already been stolen. Not coincidentally, they also learn of the existence of a shady criminal organization called Claw, and set out to Paris to investigate their first lead: a despicable Claw agent / tortured art student named Dimitri, who turns out to be quite the lounge lizard ... in more ways than one.

There's No "i" in Team

If you haven't guessed, the "band of thieves" referred to in the title is completed with the return of Bentley the turtle (the brains) and Murray the hippo (the brawn). Both are now fully playable characters, and it'll be essential to make good use of both them and Sly to complete the various heist "capers" that provide the game's new framework. Sometimes you'll have a choice of which character to play as; at other points, the narrative and situation will make the decision for you. "We wanted to make sure that we got more playable characters into the game," said Fleming. "We really wanted you to have a team feel."

Walk lightly and carry a big stick. Of explosives.

A few of you are undoubtedly already waving the Sonic Adventure 2 warning flag, but I trust that Sucker Punch will make all three characters sufficiently entertaining to play as. Rather than have separate levels for each, it'll be more like the characters are all helping each other toward a common goal. As game designer Nate Fox put it, you'll have, "... complicated interaction of three guys, all of which are playable and have their own strengths, and by working together they can do something magnificently 'thiefy.'"

To help demonstrate this new game flow, Sucker Punch ran us through Sly 2's first episode, which'll take place in the shadowy streets of a moonlit Paris. One of the first tasks at hand is to tail Dimitri back to his nightclub hangout without being spotted. Sly's just the man for the job, and you need to make use of various thiefy abilities such as climbing on roofs and crawling under objects (complete with a Metal Gear Solid-like first-person view) to evade Dimitri's nervous glances.